I've been mulling over how best to respond to this editorial by Jack McElroy in the Knoxville News-Sentinel since it ran on Sunday. The most fitting response would be arranging paper bags of dog poop so they spell out, "Jack, Your Editorial is Shit! Love, Betsy" on the front lawn of the News-Sentinel and then lighting the bags aflame, but I don't have that much dog poop.
There's a way this kind of stuff goes, a kind of script we're all used to when someone says something dumbass about sexual assault victims. First, we pick through the offending piece and show all the ways the writer's been thoughtless or cruel — like the opening paragraph of McElroy's piece when he asserts "Eight women have sued the University of Tennessee. They want citizens to pay for the pain, suffering and mental anguish they have suffered because of sexual assault." As if it's not possible that they're suing in order to make the school change how they handle sexual assault on campus.
Then the writer of the response piece, in this case, me, often tells some painful story about her own sexual assault or the sexual assaults of people near and dear to her in order to try to put a human face on what a sexual assault victim looks like, so that people like McElroy might consider more carefully in the future whether to frame the debate about sexual assault victims' wanting anonymity as a matter of possible "manipulation" or cowardice.
I'm not going to do that, because fuck it. These days it seems like a third of the internet is women saying over and over again, "I was harassed/raped/sexually assaulted/stalked/etc. and here's why I didn't get justice." If you don't know of any women who've experienced sexual violence you could ask about why they might want to remain anonymous, you can certainly Google some. Try "Erin Andrews," for starters.
Here's the thing I think when I read and re-read McElroy's piece. Only a person who is utterly clueless about the scope of the problem could possibly think that there's any danger that "liars have become visible faces of rape accusers." Visible to who? I mean, it's just laughable. I long to be in McElroy's world where a few high-profile liars are enough to make me doubt that rape's really a problem.
The truth is that you don't know a woman who hasn't been fucked with. No, not everybody's been raped. But every woman you know has been fucked with. Grabbed, fondled, exposed, unwelcomely kissed, woken up to find someone being an asshole to her body, catcalled, threatened with sexual violence, pressured into doing shit she didn't want to do and on and on and on. Every woman. So often that they're probably just ignoring whole swaths of behaviors that men would fist-fight each other over. "Oh, right, that creeper on the bus did grab my ass again. I forgot about that."
And we learn young that complaining does no good, that he's mean because he likes you, that it's a compliment, that, sure, you could complain, but who'd believe you, that you don't really want to ruin his life, do you? He's a good guy. Something bad happens to women and, if it has to do with anything sexual, we get the message, over and over again, that our discomfort is not really as important as the discomfort the man who did it might feel if we were to tell.
Considering that's the message we get since we're young, it's a wonder women report at all. But now, if they want to remain anonymous, that's not "brave" enough to suit McElroy. I can only assume McElroy has been sheltered from what women who are at the center of sexual scandals go through at the hands of people on the internet. Yes, everyone gets some level of shit, but I don't think McElroy gets the shitstorm women face.
And that got me thinking that, rather than being angry at McElroy, I'd like to issue him this challenge: Jack, I dare you to present professionally as a woman for three months. Change your name on your pieces and on your Twitter handle to Jackie. Change the gender in your bio and don't use an image of yourself. But in all other regards, keep your writing the same and your online interactions just as you always have. See what "Jackie" goes through compared to what you go through.
We live in an age of wonders. You can literally dip your toe into the culture women have to put up with all the time and see it for yourself, the unrelenting magnitude of the problem. See for yourself. Then let's talk about "brave."
